“I’m trying to overcome a typical, wrong, unbiblical attitude on the part of Christians, particularly evangelical Christians, toward this material world.

There’s a tendency for many Christians to think of this material world – the world we’re in now – as a temporary theater for getting saved so that some day you can escape this material world and live happily in heaven forever.  An awful lot of Christians say, ‘this world is going to die, it’s going to burn up, and while we’re here basically the only thing that’s important is to get people saved, and if they get saved eventually they’ll be able to leave this world.’  So it’s a temporary theater for salvation.

Instead, let’s start at the end.  At the end of time when we actually see what the triune God has been doing in creation and redemption through Jesus Christ, when we get to the very end of the Bible we see not human beings individually rising out of the material world and going to heaven forever.  Instead we see heaven, the power of God, coming down and renewing this material world.  That the whole purpose of everything God is doing in redemption is to create a material world that’s clean, that’s right, that’s pure.  A material world in which there’s no disease and there’s no death and no injustice, there’s no unraveling, there’s no decay.  The whole purpose of salvation is to cleanse and purify this material world.

Jews and Christians believe that this material world is permanent – it’s a good thing in itself.  That an eagle’s flying and great music and the ocean pounding on the shore and a great cup of wine are good things in themselves, because God is not temporarily ‘God is here so someday we’re going to live in heaven’ but the whole purpose of salvation is to make this world a great place.

God sees this world as not a temporary means to an end of salvation, but actually salvation is a temporary means to an end – to the renewal of creation.

Saving souls is a means to an end of cultural renewal.  Does the Christian church understand that?  I’m not sure.”

Just wanted to take a minute to point everybody to a great satire site.  The author specializes in Rob Bell (pastor of Mars Hill) heresy posts, I imagine because more traffic comes to the site by mentioning his name, which is a great idea.  It’s called “Apprising Ministries.”  They’ve been going for a couple years and they’ve written some really funny posts.  If you like Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, you’ll love this site!  (Slice of Laodicea and Christian Research Network often have the same posts.)

Some other good Christian satire sites:

• Lark News
• Wittenburg Door

Mark Driscoll is controversial.

In other news, water is wet.

Examiner.com did an article on Mark Driscoll’s sermons on sex titled “Pastor Preaches Oral Sex is Biblical”.  The author of the article, Karen McCracken, warns readers that the article contains “adult content.”

So in McCracken’s article on Driscoll’s poor choice of topics and language in the pulpit, she uses language risque enough to preface her article with a warning.

The piece ends with this paragraph, citing Driscoll’s inclusion in a Top 50 most influential Christians list:

Despite the controversy surrounding Driscoll he was named one of the top 50 most influential Christians in America by Zondervan this past year. For those unaware, the word influential means ‘to influence’ and according to Miriam Webster is defined as: an emanation of spiritual or moral force; corrupt interference with authority for personal gain.

So according to the general tone of the article, Driscoll should not be using adult language to discuss adult topics in an adult setting, while the author of the article does the very same thing.

Plus he’s influential, which means, naturally, he’s a corrupt spiritual force interfering with authority for personal gain.

Greg Boyd reviewed The Patriot’s Bible at Christianity Today’s blog Out of Ur.

These days what’s been on my mind is how people’s perspective shapes their thoughts, which shapes what they produce, like blog posts or sermons.  Greg Boyd is going to say certain things about The Patriot’s Bible (if you haven’t guessed, he detests it) based on his own perspective — unfortunately this isn’t as obvious to some — and therefore his sermons/blogs/conversations are going to have a certain bent to them.

It seems to me that we’re all looking for the one right answer to an issue, as if every issue in life were either this or that, black or white, and so when we read a review on one of many Bibles available, we’re looking to give it our stamp of approval or our stamp of heretical.

These days what I think of when I read blogs or hear sermons is not, “Is this true or not true,” but “Why has this person come to this conclusion on this text when others have come to completely different conclusions?  What’s at the bottom of this person’s view of the world?”

And most of the time it clears things right up.  Of course Mark Driscoll is going to say that about women in ministry – look at who he reads and the people he associates most closely with.  Of course Hugh Heffner is going to have that opinion about nudity – look at how he’s spent the past 50 years of his life.  Of course Greg Boyd is going to have that perspective on The Patriot’s Bible – listen to his sermons or read his books.

It all goes down to your fundamental views on how life works.

I know this doesn’t solve the issue, and I’m not advocating not debating or blogging about issues, I’m simply saying if we take a few steps back we might save ourselves a lot of energy by first taking a look at everybody’s starting point.

“What happens when it all becomes about some other life is we end up being very fractured, broken people. I began to discover that you could be a Christian in a nice Christian church and be saved and be singing all the right songs and actually be miserable. And to have anger and rage and people you haven’t forgiven. I discovered it’s possible to be a super-Christian and yet salvation hadn’t even begun to (be) a part of your life. It’s possible to lead a church and to be like a shell of a person. I want to be the kind of person who’s pursuing wholeness and allowing every single area of my life to let the light get shone in, and let God make peace where there wasn’t (peace) before.”  –Rob Bell

“Though today some Christians believe that Jesus came to enable us to escape this creation and live eternally in an otherworldly and heavenly dwelling, such an understanding of salvation would have been entirely foreign to Old Testament prophets, to first-century Jews — and to Jesus himself.  Salvation is not an escape from creational life into “spiritual” existence: it is the restoration of God’s rule over all of creation and all of human life.  Neither is salvation merely the restoration of a personal relationship with God, important as that is.  Salvation goes further: it is the restoration of the whole life of humankind and ultimately of the nonhuman creation as well.  This is the scope of biblical salvation.” –The Drama of Scripture

There’s risk in pointing out to the world one 15-second snippet of a 30-minute teaching.  There’s more risk when that teaching comes forth from a specific community rooted in a specific geographic location with a specific history.  And there’s even more risk when that community is often criticized either fairly or unfairly.

That being said, there are some people who are genuinely curious about what kind of place Mars Hill (Grandville) is.  The teaching from yesterday by an elder, David Livermore, gives an excellent, albeit brief, peek into what’s going on amidst the Mars Hill Community.

“Mars Hill is not first and foremost an edgy, cool, hip, trendy church.   Mars Hill is not first and foremost about Rob Bell.  Mars Hill is not first and foremost about our wonderful staff or our faithful volunteers.  It’s not first and foremost about some great guest speaker that we might have come in.  It’s first and foremost about Jesus.  Last I checked Jesus is still on the throne.  Jesus is still working here.  Jesus still has good things for us to be about.”

The entire podcast can be downloaded here.

After a lifetime of wild living…

“He felt an overwhelming peace. His heart stopped pounding. His hands stopped twitching. He saw a ’shimmering, dazzling, nearly blinding brightness that made me cover my eyes with my hands.’”
–Joe Eszterhas, author, Basic Instinct and new spiritual memoir Crossbearer

Toledo Blade Article: ‘Basic Instinct’ author writes book about faith

In 2002 at my Christian college I remember James MacDonald giving a sermon in which he quoted an Isaiah passage about how God seeks his own glory. In 2003 I read John Piper’s book Desiring God and was convinced of it.

In 2008 I read Tim Keller’s The Reason For God in which he talks about God being a trinity and the endless giving that takes place within this relationship. Keller then said something that shocked me:

“That is why God is infinitely happy, because there is an ‘other-orientation’ at the heart of his being, because he does not seek his own glory but the glory of others.”

–Tim Keller, The Reason For God pg.218

Tim Keller & John Piper are on the same page about almost everything; this seems like a pretty big thing, though.

Piper quotes some Bible verses to back up his opinion here.

New Testament scholar Ben Witherington seems to be more in line with Keller’s assertion. He says this on a blog post titled, “For God So Loved Himself? Is God a Narcissist?“:

“I am arguing Christ, the perfect image of God’s character, reveals that God’s character is essentially other directed self-sacrificial love. God loves people, not merely as means to his own ends, but as ends in themselves.”

Does God seeks his own glory or does he seek the glory of others?

“Strong rationalism assumes that it is possible to achieve ‘the view from nowhere,’ a position of almost complete objectivity, but virtually all philosophers today agree that is impossible. We come to every individual evaluation with all sorts of experiences and background beliefs that strongly influence our thinking and the way our reason works. It is not fair, then, to demand an argument that all rational people would have to bow to…Atheists and agnostics ask for this kind of ‘proof’ for God, but are not alone in holding to strong rationalism. Many Christians claim that their arguments for faith are so strong that all who reject them are simply closing their minds to the truth out of fear or stubbornness.”
–Tim Keller, The Reason For God pg.118

“There is no objective, universal consensus about what…it means to be happy and fully human.”
–Tim Keller, The Reason For God pg.18